Maybe he's dreaming about that New Haven service call he made after someone duplicating a derriere sat too heavily upon a copier's glass. (Ouch!) Or perhaps he's reliving a visit to a Hartford account, the one where an office saboteur replaced toner, the sootlike fairy dust of the copier world, with Cremora. (Ugh!) After 17 years as a field service technician with Glastonbury-based A-Copy, averaging five calls a day up and down the Connecticut River Valley, the reasons for Milardo's midnight mirth could really stack up.

They could stack up as high as the average 1.7 million copies made each month by the machines he maintains, as high as Boston's skyscraping Prudential Center.

Indeed, his snickering snoozes could be philosophically fueled by the modern office's deep dependence on a machine that's at once utter magic to the average user and infamously finicky.

"A copier is the most service-prone device you'll have in your office," says Garry Wallace, service manager for A-Copy's Connecticut region.

"Copiers do two things: They make copies, and they break down," he says.

And this is Milardo's boss talking. Out on the road, a standard corporate greeting for Milardo and his 35-pound briefcase of screwdrivers, wrenches and cleaning fluids goes: "We ought to get you a desk here." (Some big corporate and academic accounts actually have technicians who make the rounds fixing just their copiers all day.)

Sympathetic to their plight, Milardo knows most have no idea how their copier works. "It's a magic box to [customers]. They see

a bright light and -- poof! -- out the other end comes this fantastic-looking copy," he says.

In fact, most folks would sooner stare into a copier's 200-watt scanner lamp than sit through a full explanation of the machine's workings. (About that copier light, it's not blinding, Milardo insists. But he adds, "the only people who can really stare at it are the ones who attended Woodstock or something.")

A copier's complexity explains its fairly frequent failings.

Simple mechanics can cause problems as the paper-jammed souls at offices worldwide well know: Worn feeder rollers might fail to grab paper or to pass it along.

Last Thursday, the 38-year-old Milardo was at Madrigal Audio Laboratories in Middletown using an instrument resembling a long dental pick to extract a single mislaid paper clip jamming the document feeder on a Canon model NP6650. His bandaged left thumb had been cut by an exit claw, one of several sharp little parts that guide paper out of copiers.

When a claw wears down, copies get crushed on their way out. "It's making an accordion," an account will tell Milardo.

Once again, he'll get down on his knees to replace the parts, routinely wearing away the knees of his pants and, he says, his knees too -- having had surgery on both in recent years.

As for a copier's electrical workings, much simplified, they include wires called coronas that pass the light-scanned image of an original document on to a rotating metal drum via a high-voltage charge.

The drum's charge attracts toner -- a powdery plastic resin. Another corona's electrical charge draws the toner away from the drum and onto the passing paper. The paper then gets squeezed between heated rollers that fuse the toner to it at temperatures of up to 190 degrees F.

At his Madrigal stop last week, Milardo did preventive maintenance, restringing aging, gold-plated corona wires like a practiced surgeon stitching a wound. Broken-down or dirty corona wires lead to lined or faded copies.

It's virtually a rite of passage for copier technicians to make a mistake and get a 6,000-volt zap from corona wires, Milardo says. Because the jolt is low in amperes, it doesn't do much damage, he says: "You'll feel the metal fillings in your mouth. It'll sit you down real quick." But a copier fixer's foulest fate, and another possible subject for Milardo's zany z's, occurred years back. Then, most machines he worked on used a liquid solution of jet black ink.

"Liquid was funny," Milardo concedes in retrospect.

Those copiers worked just fine, but their ink and ink solution was pumped through a system of plastic tubing.

When tubes clogged, leaked or broke, "it was like a vein," and a copier's indelible lifeblood squirted and spritzed everywhere. Milardo recalls routinely moving copiers to cover ink spots on customers' carpets, shifting pictures on their walls to hide other stains.

They became adept at scissor-trimming neckties that accidentally dipped into the machines' 2-quart wells of ink solution.

Recalling those days while working last week, Milardo said, "I

wore toner for this company." And as for hands, well, Milardo scrubbed his with a mixture of kerosene and borax, scrubbed them until they cracked and bled, but he still had the cuticles of a coal miner.

Now with dry toner, copier servicing has become cleaner but not easier, says Milardo, citing new, fancy features and the Law of Rising Duplication Expectations. "Years ago, [customers] didn't notice anything until nothing came out the other end," he says. "Today, a spot [on copies] might get called in." (If the spot stays in the same place, copy after copy, it's probably a mark on a copier's glass. If it moves, it may be due to a scratch on the machine's image-transferring drum, caused by staples passing through or the ring on a hand digging out a paper jam, Milardo says.)

He diagnoses a machine's ills, in part, by copying off a test sheet that looks like a cross between an eye chart and a wee-hours TV pattern.

He looks for uneven blacknesses or blurred details that can be the product of dirty corona wires or copier optics, both of which get polluted by cigarette smoke.

A-Copy, which has service contracts with its accounts, is testing systems by which phone-linked copiers will automatically alert central service computers if they go awry.

This would reduce repair lag time, A-Copy's Wallace says: a lag that often occurs when office workers with a choice of copiers pursue that peculiar practice of simply avoiding the troubled ones rather than calling to get them fixed.

Advanced copiers may even be able to detect problems like reduced light or electrical outputs before the effects are visible in copies, he says, improving maintenance and reducing breakdown rates.

But whether it's a customer or copier calling for help, Milardo's uproarious repose, his unconscious cackles may ultimately be his way of letting out the last laugh.

"We're pretty secure in our jobs," he says of copier technicians, "just because a copier is an electromechanical device. ... They seem to fail when you need them the most."